Ren Yi Hooi

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Ren Yi Hooi is founder and CEO of Lightning Reach, the financial-support portal she launched during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. The platform connects people in financial hardship with grants, benefits, and other support across a fragmented UK ecosystem in which around £19bn of available funding goes unclaimed each year.

Lightning Reach now has more than 140,000 registered users and has facilitated over £15M in grant funding, working with charities including the Royal British Legion, local authorities, housing associations, utilities such as OVO and EON Next, and banks including Lloyds and TSB. The company raised £1M in its first institutional round in 2023 from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Big Issue Invest's Growth Impact Fund, Barrow Cadbury Trust, and others, after earlier backing from Techstars and Chris Adelsbach.

Hooi started her career as a consultant at Bain & Company before moving into financial inclusion roles at MILVIK BIMA, where she ran the Malaysia operation for the mobile insurance and health business, and at Railsbank as Director of Financial Inclusion. Earlier work spans the Rockefeller Foundation, microfinance projects in Ghana, and the Singapore Foreign Service.